Clarity First - How Smart Leaders and Organizations Achieve Outstanding Performance

I’ve been reading a lot of leadership/organizational development books lately because I’ve been on several launch or re-launch teams. I’ve received the books to read in exchange for a review and a little promotion. Here’s the thing, though, I’m not promoting anything I don’t believe in as being sound. And, there’s been at least one book I read that I reviewed, but did nothing else. If you’re reading this blog, I want you to know a free book to me doesn’t mean glowing reviews will result. Authors have to earn it.

Having said that, I want to give a shout out for a re-launch of Karen Martin’s book Clarity First – How Smart Leaders and Organizations Achieve Outstanding Performance, which actually released earlier this year. It’s a well-written, in-depth look at the importance of achieving clarity in organizations. In a nutshell, Martin says clarity affects how leaders lead, how managers manage, and how frontline team members do the work.

She says there are many obstacles to clarity including ignorance, lack of curiosity, hubris, cognitive biases, time constraints, and fear. Also, organizations are either clarity pursuers, clarity avoiders, or the clarity blind. I’m stating the obvious here, but the goal of the book is to show leaders the importance of becoming clarity pursuers.

Martin starts with purpose saying it isn’t what you do, but why you do what you do. Everyone needs to understand the purpose so they aren’t off doing their best at things that don’t matter to the organization. She points out organizations often confuse purpose with their mission, vision, values, and guiding principles, but they’re not the same. Purpose is important because it matters for the organization, for the employees, and for the customers.

Once an organization is clear on purpose, then leaders need to determine the priorities. It has to start at the highest level and it should be limited in scope because too many priorities create cognitive drain and productivity drain. Martin emphasizes without clear priorities the most important issue is the one making the most noise at the moment.

Next, organizations need clear, well-designed, well-executed, and well-managed processes in order to excel. One of the most startling observations Martin makes is when she asks leaders what percentage of their processes are documented, current, followed, measured, and continuously improved in their organizations and the universal answer is close to zero percent. Wow! The good news, Martin says, is almost anyone can learn how to design processes.

Performance follows processes and Martin emphasizes performance isn’t just about financial balances or sales gains or loses. It’s about lead time, productivity, quality, one-time delivery, first call resolution, product returns, and employee turnover for example. She goes into great detail to explain the need for and how to use data to measure performance. She also explains what Key Performance Indicators are and how organizations should use them.

Finally, she tackles the need for problem solving capabilities. Her thought is most organizations, and especially those without clarity, don’t know the difference between problem solving and problem mitigation. Too many leaders solve problems reactively, which is mitigating problems. Defining and understanding the problem should be the most time intensive aspect of problem solving, she says, because if you don’t know what the real problem is, how are you going to actually find ways to deal with it.  Problems are not bad things, generally, they are just gaps between where an organization is and where it needs to be.

The inside jacket calls this book, a visionary road map and practical guide, which I think is an accurate description.

It’s definitely worth the investment of time to read it carefully and to follow the recommendations made within it.